Peter Kirby

My view is that it's not worth reading. It's popular junk.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

John Kesler

I don't think that The Case for Christ will convince many skeptics to convert to Christianity. The book's "value" is that it assembles in one work many of the common arguments one can expect to see from Christian apologists.

Diogenes the Cynic

It's kind of time consuming to comprehensively critique the whole book. Does your wife have any specific chapters or arguments she would like a response to?

I can say that all Strobel really does in all his books is compile a lot of stock, mostly spurious, hack apologist arguments from almost entirely non-scholarly sources. If you give us a specific chapter we can dissect it for you and show you what we mean. Strobel writes for believers who won't be likely to fact check or ask questions. He is woefully unconvincing and almost chldishly easy to refute for skeptics.

Amaleq13

He spends too much time addressing arguments that aren't actually made by any skeptics and ignores too many unanswered questions (some of which are part of actual arguments offered by skeptics) that do manage to get mentioned. It is a complete joke and waste of time. If you must read it, check it out of the library.

Damo

My fundie brother gave me that book as a conversion attempt, telling me the author used to be atheist... I read it out of some feeling that if I didn't at least read it, I would be a bad brother and closed-minded about even revisiting the subject of religion... I shouldn't have bothered, it was a waste of time and the first book I ever threw into the trash because it wasn't worth the space on my bookshelf... I found the reviews posted here on infidels.org to be very useful breath of fresh air after reading it... it is one of the reasons I joined IIDB...

It was hackneyed format that wasted a lot of space on stupid analogies to modern criminal court cases, a flimsy pretense that Lee Strobel was a former atheist (except his words about not wanting to be an atheist because he wanted to keep his immoral ways struck me as very hollow... at best he was probably an apatheist who got religion when his wife did, at worse he's just lying about being an ex-atheist because it boosts his profile among Christians who buy this crap) and was asking objective questions (to members of only the convservative evangelical branch of christian theology, no sketpics or even liberal Christians at all, one source for each line of evidence, what kind of investigative reporting is that?) but accepting and embracing the first (usually quite shallow) answers they give him and expecting the reader to buy that he's an objective reporter and that the arguments he's getting are so persuasive they persuade even him

Lots of bullshit like an argumentum ad populum about how many bibles there are compared to other ancient sources... I think he used 500 AD as his cut off, and I'm like... ok... a) monks were making lots of copies, which the church preferentially preserved for 1500 more years, b) you were burning pagan books (e.g. the Library of Alexandria... ) so they weren't as likely to survive, and c) just because something is more succesful in terms of number of copies doesn't make it better... like, Windows is more succesful than LINUX in terms on number of copies running, but does that make it the better Operating System?

Mentioning only the most innocous contradictions in the NT like the gospel genealogies and providing very unconvincing explanations for them, avoiding dozzies like how precisely Judas died and what happened to the blood money... claiming that all the Jesus-like mystery religions are copy cats, not vice versa, ignorning Mithras all together (could it be because Mithras was bigger than the minor cults he mentions and pre-dates Christ?)

The punchline of the whole book was a rendition of Pacal's Wager... at which point I realized how thoroughly I had wasted my time...

telerion

I have never read The Case for Christ, and I suspect that I never will. This is because I have read his book The Case for Faith. It was so saturated with intellectual puerility that I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated at the whole charade. I tried writing notes in the margins, pointing out obvious fallacies and suggesting objections that even the most reluctant agnostic could not neglect, but this couldn't assuage the pain.

Clearly Lee Strobel's works are not for a serious audience. These con jobs are like warm milk which gets drowsy children to fall back asleep lest they realize that they are enshrouded by darkness.

Toto

Lee Strobel is a former drunk who stopped drinking with Jesus' help, and now feels he needs to promote religion. He was probably never a principled atheist, but he was a secular news reporter and a skeptic or sorts. However, he now feels he has a mission to shore up Christianity so it will be available for other drunks who need to stop drinking.

He runs a religious discussion program on PAX-TV called Faith Under Fire which is actually not too bad and shows that he was not a complete loser in his former profession. But he is not acting as a journalist in his book - he is acting as a promoter.

Damo

yep. and when one is wide awake and standing the light and gets handed that cup of warm milk, like I was, I couldn't help but notice it was quite sour...

my brother hadn't even read the book before he gave it to me, he'd just been told that it was a good book for witnessing to atheists (and here it backfired, I'd lapsed into apathy about religious questions, after reading that book, I started lurking on IIDB), and I guess knowing I was a bookworm, thought this would be the magic pill... one little book to save me... it's hysterical because frankly as when we were kids he never read very much... and suddenly he's giving me a book that's much poorer in quality than stuff I'd already read on the issue in high school...

since he hadn't even read the thing, I thought it was pointless to try and refute it to him point by point, but I did send him a copy of Demon-Haunted World (not a case for atheism per se but by far the best book I could give him to show where I'm coming from philosophically), ... don't know if he ever read it, but at least he stopped sending me crud like Case for Christ

John Kesler

Does anyone know why Faith Under Fire hasn't aired recently? A Christian blogger's site says the following, dated August 6, 2005:

jonesg

Its fine, not great but not bad either. There are better books.
The mistake he makes is trying to prove by opinion.

If she's reading books like that , she's seeking truth and that search will bring her ultimately to God, it takes time.